(no subject)
Feb. 28th, 2012 01:27 am✖ PLAYER:
Name & LJ:
Birthdate & Age:
Characters played in Zodion: None.
✖ CHARACTER:
Name: Mairu Orihara
Canon: Durarara!!
PB/Image: The one in the glasses.
Info links: Wiki page.
Canon Point:
Gender: Female
Age: 15 in canon, aged up. (Wiki lists her as 14, as far as I can tell, this is incorrect or is only correct for her anime cameo.)
Birthdate/Sign: (please note if birthdate is canon or not! if not EXPLAIN why you chose what you did!)
Tattoo:
Suitability: There are a lot of reasons she's suitable. For one, her older brother is Izaya--that's pretty much the base of all of it, but let's go deeper. Since starting high school she's been living on her own with her twin sister. She's taken a job spying on Izaya from his own secretary. She seems immensely suited to information gathering and all the snooping and twisted personality that implies.
She's fearless. She is incredibly mentally fucked up, but in such a way that being independent in terms of taking care of herself is no problem (in terms of being away from her twin is a different kettle of fish but doesn't affect her suitability). She reads porn and comments about it in public, picks up wounded assassins and makes them her errand boys, and is in general not the type to be disturbed by anything--this includes being terribly bothered by unusual circumstances. She shows quite an active and explicit interest in sex in canon, though it seems she's probably less aggressive in action than word. Still, the idea of sex at all doesn't bother her, and she is often pepper-sprayed by her twin for getting too frisky in trying to fool around. Or censored by the in-canon online chat filter, for obscenity. She publicly gropes her own sister, steals girl's bras, makes obscene comments and so on. She is also used to living independent of a guardian and dealing with a terrible older brother and has rather disturbing knowledge of the underworld for a girl her age.
She's not cynical and jaded, but she is very open and blunt about sex and her sexuality--beyond frank, she often over-shares. It might be impossible to actually make her self-conscious and her attitude around sex is open.
Power:
Personality: Mairu is quite simply not right in the head. She is, at first glance, a meek looking liberal arts student, and then when she opens her mouth she comes across as cheerful, fearless, aggressive, sexual, and strange. This is just the tip of her iceberg of issues. From birth she's been inseparable from her twin sister, Kururi. At a young age their older brother, Izaya, made a comment about them that would affect the rest of their lives and personalities drastically. Quite simply, he wondered what the point was if they were exactly the same.
As tiny children with a brother almost a decade older than they, a brother very much into human observation but a man they admired greatly, this comment troubled Mairu and her sister. They wanted their brother to love them, because they admired him, and as a natural consequence they decided to do something to catch his attention. If there was no point in being the same, they'd be different from each other. This resulted in the beginning of a strange system for them--they split the personality traits they deemed made a perfect person, from hobbies and interests to actual personality traits like loudness and meekness, among them. It was like they were building characters out of themselves, and min-maxing their stat points to make the best RPG party out of the two of them. Mairu got athletic interest, reading, and the loud personality, but the conservative dress sense. Kururi got the interest in gadgets, the quiet personality and withdrawn demeanor, but the active decisiveness and the weird dress sense. And so on. Because they believed they were the same person, it really didn't matter if all the traits "matched" the person they belonged to, because they always made a complete and perfect set together.
This was their tiny child logic, in trying to create themselves as the perfect human that their brother would love and notice. Now, this is merely speculation from observing their traits in canon, but it seems very likely that their original model of a "perfect human" relied heavily on Izaya's personality traits as they understood him when they were children (in essence, attempting to role play as their brother by splitting his traits between them). Back to canon! Since splitting their "perfect human" traits between each other, Mairu and Kururi grew up this way and became more and more focused on each other and their goal of perfection. They grew to hate their brother--if not, perhaps, true hate, they certainly have come to realize he is not a good person and believe he will never be someone that loves them and so they often and cheerfully abuse him verbally or pick on him. Yet at the same time there are obvious indicators that their claims of despising him are not really true. Some examples are how Mairu calls Izaya for information on Celty as her first recourse, in book 4, and how in book 9 she and Kururi accept and seem happy by the fact that Izaya sent Celty to protect Kururi (though the whole interaction is tsundere in general, it's also obvious Mairu and Kururi are both surprised and pleased by Izaya's intervention, and pick on him in an almost loving way even after his claims that it was all self-serving). This doesn't mean that Mairu and Kururi get along with Izaya in a peachy way, as Mairu's general greeting to Izaya is to tell him to die and try to kick him in the head before continuing on with any actual conversation. And Mairu and Kururi have been hired to spy on Izaya, and even offer his rival/enemy Aoba information on him freely without seeming to care about Izaya's well-being. Cute sibling hijinks!
In short, Mairu cannot be understood without understanding her relationship to both her siblings. Though she has a distinct and unique personality, all her traits are and were formed and created by her relationship with Izaya and Kururi. Izaya is the basis of her strange personality and relationship with Kururi, though Izaya is increasingly less important to her current personality as it is. Kururi, on the other hand, is what Mairu considers her other half. Mairu is not a "whole person" she is half of one, in her mind. Mairu and Kururi together form a "whole person" and while they can function separately, they are still the same person to Mairu's mind. It's a strange mental feat, but Mairu can refer to her sister separately without seeing them as necessarily separate. They're different, but the same. Mairu is dependent on Kururi in a rather major way, as Kururi is the decision maker in their relationship, even though Mairu is the louder more apparently aggressive one, Kururi is the one who makes the choices--examples might be that Kururi is the one to decide on liking Aoba, and Mairu goes along with it without question. And Kururi is the one to also, it's implied, have the original crush on Heiwajima Kasuka. Mairu is not, in herself, particularly passive, and can be quite aggressive and decisive, but she is used to Kururi leading their decisions and listening to Kururi.
Mairu is also pretty fearless and disturbingly smart and knowledgeable. While Kururi is probably the more intellectual one in general, Mairu is by no means stupid or ignorant. She can be less observant and more oblivious, but she is surprisingly insightful and sharp for someone who acts rather oblivious at times--rather, her obliviousness is more to do with social norms and is not obliviousness at all, but complete disregard. She doesn't care if she's not normal, and her blind spot may be that she doesn't care what kind of target this makes her--she isn't oblivious even to that though, and deals cheerfully (and scarily) with bullies and perverts. She will amusingly call people perverted while she herself could easily count as a sexual deviant, openly admitting to being bisexual, poly-amorous and even reading porn publicly. Mairu brooks absolutely no harassment, and will respond to even verbal bullying with physical retaliation. She can be quite a scary, manic, borderline psychotic person, because she never seems to care if she hurts someone she deems unimportant or deserves it.
✖ SAMPLES:
"Zodion" First-Person Network Entry:
"Zodionlogs" Third-Person Prose Entry: (200 word min)
Name & LJ:
Birthdate & Age:
Characters played in Zodion: None.
✖ CHARACTER:
Name: Mairu Orihara
Canon: Durarara!!
PB/Image: The one in the glasses.
Info links: Wiki page.
Canon Point:
Gender: Female
Age: 15 in canon, aged up. (Wiki lists her as 14, as far as I can tell, this is incorrect or is only correct for her anime cameo.)
Birthdate/Sign: (please note if birthdate is canon or not! if not EXPLAIN why you chose what you did!)
Tattoo:
Suitability: There are a lot of reasons she's suitable. For one, her older brother is Izaya--that's pretty much the base of all of it, but let's go deeper. Since starting high school she's been living on her own with her twin sister. She's taken a job spying on Izaya from his own secretary. She seems immensely suited to information gathering and all the snooping and twisted personality that implies.
She's fearless. She is incredibly mentally fucked up, but in such a way that being independent in terms of taking care of herself is no problem (in terms of being away from her twin is a different kettle of fish but doesn't affect her suitability). She reads porn and comments about it in public, picks up wounded assassins and makes them her errand boys, and is in general not the type to be disturbed by anything--this includes being terribly bothered by unusual circumstances. She shows quite an active and explicit interest in sex in canon, though it seems she's probably less aggressive in action than word. Still, the idea of sex at all doesn't bother her, and she is often pepper-sprayed by her twin for getting too frisky in trying to fool around. Or censored by the in-canon online chat filter, for obscenity. She publicly gropes her own sister, steals girl's bras, makes obscene comments and so on. She is also used to living independent of a guardian and dealing with a terrible older brother and has rather disturbing knowledge of the underworld for a girl her age.
She's not cynical and jaded, but she is very open and blunt about sex and her sexuality--beyond frank, she often over-shares. It might be impossible to actually make her self-conscious and her attitude around sex is open.
Power:
Personality: Mairu is quite simply not right in the head. She is, at first glance, a meek looking liberal arts student, and then when she opens her mouth she comes across as cheerful, fearless, aggressive, sexual, and strange. This is just the tip of her iceberg of issues. From birth she's been inseparable from her twin sister, Kururi. At a young age their older brother, Izaya, made a comment about them that would affect the rest of their lives and personalities drastically. Quite simply, he wondered what the point was if they were exactly the same.
As tiny children with a brother almost a decade older than they, a brother very much into human observation but a man they admired greatly, this comment troubled Mairu and her sister. They wanted their brother to love them, because they admired him, and as a natural consequence they decided to do something to catch his attention. If there was no point in being the same, they'd be different from each other. This resulted in the beginning of a strange system for them--they split the personality traits they deemed made a perfect person, from hobbies and interests to actual personality traits like loudness and meekness, among them. It was like they were building characters out of themselves, and min-maxing their stat points to make the best RPG party out of the two of them. Mairu got athletic interest, reading, and the loud personality, but the conservative dress sense. Kururi got the interest in gadgets, the quiet personality and withdrawn demeanor, but the active decisiveness and the weird dress sense. And so on. Because they believed they were the same person, it really didn't matter if all the traits "matched" the person they belonged to, because they always made a complete and perfect set together.
This was their tiny child logic, in trying to create themselves as the perfect human that their brother would love and notice. Now, this is merely speculation from observing their traits in canon, but it seems very likely that their original model of a "perfect human" relied heavily on Izaya's personality traits as they understood him when they were children (in essence, attempting to role play as their brother by splitting his traits between them). Back to canon! Since splitting their "perfect human" traits between each other, Mairu and Kururi grew up this way and became more and more focused on each other and their goal of perfection. They grew to hate their brother--if not, perhaps, true hate, they certainly have come to realize he is not a good person and believe he will never be someone that loves them and so they often and cheerfully abuse him verbally or pick on him. Yet at the same time there are obvious indicators that their claims of despising him are not really true. Some examples are how Mairu calls Izaya for information on Celty as her first recourse, in book 4, and how in book 9 she and Kururi accept and seem happy by the fact that Izaya sent Celty to protect Kururi (though the whole interaction is tsundere in general, it's also obvious Mairu and Kururi are both surprised and pleased by Izaya's intervention, and pick on him in an almost loving way even after his claims that it was all self-serving). This doesn't mean that Mairu and Kururi get along with Izaya in a peachy way, as Mairu's general greeting to Izaya is to tell him to die and try to kick him in the head before continuing on with any actual conversation. And Mairu and Kururi have been hired to spy on Izaya, and even offer his rival/enemy Aoba information on him freely without seeming to care about Izaya's well-being. Cute sibling hijinks!
In short, Mairu cannot be understood without understanding her relationship to both her siblings. Though she has a distinct and unique personality, all her traits are and were formed and created by her relationship with Izaya and Kururi. Izaya is the basis of her strange personality and relationship with Kururi, though Izaya is increasingly less important to her current personality as it is. Kururi, on the other hand, is what Mairu considers her other half. Mairu is not a "whole person" she is half of one, in her mind. Mairu and Kururi together form a "whole person" and while they can function separately, they are still the same person to Mairu's mind. It's a strange mental feat, but Mairu can refer to her sister separately without seeing them as necessarily separate. They're different, but the same. Mairu is dependent on Kururi in a rather major way, as Kururi is the decision maker in their relationship, even though Mairu is the louder more apparently aggressive one, Kururi is the one who makes the choices--examples might be that Kururi is the one to decide on liking Aoba, and Mairu goes along with it without question. And Kururi is the one to also, it's implied, have the original crush on Heiwajima Kasuka. Mairu is not, in herself, particularly passive, and can be quite aggressive and decisive, but she is used to Kururi leading their decisions and listening to Kururi.
Mairu is also pretty fearless and disturbingly smart and knowledgeable. While Kururi is probably the more intellectual one in general, Mairu is by no means stupid or ignorant. She can be less observant and more oblivious, but she is surprisingly insightful and sharp for someone who acts rather oblivious at times--rather, her obliviousness is more to do with social norms and is not obliviousness at all, but complete disregard. She doesn't care if she's not normal, and her blind spot may be that she doesn't care what kind of target this makes her--she isn't oblivious even to that though, and deals cheerfully (and scarily) with bullies and perverts. She will amusingly call people perverted while she herself could easily count as a sexual deviant, openly admitting to being bisexual, poly-amorous and even reading porn publicly. Mairu brooks absolutely no harassment, and will respond to even verbal bullying with physical retaliation. She can be quite a scary, manic, borderline psychotic person, because she never seems to care if she hurts someone she deems unimportant or deserves it.
✖ SAMPLES:
"Zodion" First-Person Network Entry:
"Zodionlogs" Third-Person Prose Entry: (200 word min)